Should A Flash Back Always Be In Black & White?

About 62 days ago, 2008 finished its journey finally to make way for 2009. It was the year that brought dramatic changes to things that seemed well set for a long time. As I roll back the imaginary magnetic tapes on which I store all the major incidents of the past year for blog writing purposes, I see so many events that will be remembered, talked and referenced in years to come. Good and bad things happened in random fashion as Myanmar got hit with a bad hurricane, China hosted its first Olympics with a huge and brightly colored iron fist, military conflict broke out between Russia and Georgia, after which Israel and Palestine took their turn, terrorists continued to use stupidity as their weapon of mass destruction as they went on their usual spree of killing innocent people in various parts of India and the rest of the world and Global economic recession threatened to make our lives, present and future, dangerously uncertain (and still does) and as consolation prize the US of A got its first black president in Obama and Team India won the 20Twenty world cup. Frankly, 2008 had 12 more months than it should. I felt like it took forever to finish.

Personally 2008 was an historic year for me. So many things changed, for better and worse that I would be able to trace back most of the future episodes in my life back to 2008. It started with a possibility. As 2007 closed, I finished my graduate thesis defense and technically graduated. I started applying for jobs as the new year celebrations went off for big O-8. I kept applying and nothing was happening. The now-confirmed US economic recession was budding at that time and the job market did not look too bright. After some consultation with my friends and colleagues I joined a consulting company whose name is a combination of a sensory organ and the most important connector in our body. I moved to Dallas and like most consultants, stayed in an apartment home with 4 more guys as I learned the technical and non-technical ways of a consultant’s life. Once the training was over it was time for project hunt. As I waited for the illusive client calls for the bunch of applications we send on a daily basis the downturn in the job market shifted to higher gears casting more doubts on tomorrow. Things moved slowly and on the 20th of April, just after dinner time, finally I got the call. It was a moment of happiness and anxiety. I had, in the mean time, lost 10 pounds due to poor dietary habits, made some very good friends, gained quite a bit of working skills on a framework named after an island in Indonesia and missed the marriage of a very close cousin back home.

Anywho, I moved from Dallas to Phoenix, Arizona for the new position. I stayed with a college friend who lived in Tucson for about a week, before finding a place in Phoenix with his help. The fun-nest part of moving as a consultant is that you need to always buy things you need the most. Comforters/sleeping bags, pillows, plates, bags, excess clothes, essential accessories (thanks to restrictions imposed by TSA) like shampoo, shaving cream, deodorant, yada yada need to be bought whenever your travel involves airplane(s). After buying all of these things, again, I settled into my new house, shared between 4 guys. The guys were students at Arizona State University and it was nice to be with students again. The nice part evaporated soon after, once I found out about the nasty bed-bug infestation in the house. Every night, we lost a few liters of blood to these night crawlers and in return got multiple bumps/rashes well grouped into sets of three in straight lines- what bug specialists call ‘breakfast-lunch-dinner’ pattern. Never having encountered them in my life before, they kept me awake all night with their bites so that I was Mr. Sleepy Red Eye the next morning at work. After about a month, I moved to near by apartment, same setup, but the other 3 roommates were working professionals and that kind of helped with arrangements. Man proposes Bed Bugs dispose. This house had even bigger bug problem, both bed and roach family. I had to move again, after about a month, but this time things turned around.

Work was going well, and I had moved to a nice apartment, with even nicer roommates and lots of space. After a long time this was a place that could honestly qualify as a long-term prospect. I picked up on some old activities I used to enjoy like cricket, watching movies, daydreaming and started attending Judo. It needs to be mentioned about the helping mentality of these roommates and I am thankful for all the free rides, literally and metaphorically. Due to a very helpful and knowledgeable friend from work I attended the Rider’s Course for Bikers and successfully got the driving license for motorcycle. In September of 2008, I purchased the first automobile paid off completely from my pocket, a used 2007 Kawasaki Ninja EX250-Black, and have been riding that baby ever since. Five days to work and one day to the Mall/Movie and one day for complete rest, I was living life-Jeans Style (Shankar’s Movie, not the clothes, bcoz that wouldn’t make any sense), minus twin brother and Aishwarya Rai.

2008 was also the year during which I went on a number of tours across the US of A. For Labor Day in May, I went to San-Francisco and Los Angeles, California, for Memorial Day in August, Seattle-Washington, Thanks Giving day in November, New York City, New York and Washington D.C. and in between theses trips, I also made multiple trips to Las Vegas, Tucson and the Grand Canyon. In a span of 7 months I had visited The Golden Gate bridge, The Universal Studios, Mt.Rainier, Boeing Manufacturing Plant, The strip Street in Las Vegas, Statue of Liberty, The White House and the South Rim of Grand Canyon.

US-wise, the stocks were falling, the Presidential Election process was under full swing and Michael Phelps had more gold from Olympic Medals than the US Treasury. Changes were abundant locally as well. In October My client company offered me permanent position in their company and I accepted to make it the first full-time salaried job of my life. By December all the roommates in my apartment had moved out to separate homes/apartments one after the other which left me with a new set of roomies. I learned to cook and organize stuff and as the 2008 closed I prepared to move out as well due to a growing infestation of- yes, you guessed it - Bed Bugs. I don’t know why these things keep ‘bugging’ me.

As you finish reading this, I have moved to a different spacious apartment with a room for myself. I have a sort of new roommate, new as room mate here, but he is an old friend of mine from college who works in a very old and stable bank. The home’s furnishings are being done slowly- it’s a bit hard to track free/subsidized stuff from craigs list or some other local online classifieds. As of Mar 01 2009 I am looking for, among other things, a kitchen table to keep the microwave, a free TV, a Jeans-style Aishwarya Rai (resemblance not mandatory) to continue my Jeans-style life and a SIX PACK ABS [:)] [:)] [:)].
Hopefully the rest of 2009 would show the way.

Is It Stil Called Brain Drain?

From the article India Calling by Anand Giridharadas -NYTimes

“WHAT are Papa and I doing here?”

These words, instant-messaged by my mother in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean cables and came to me in the village where I’m now living, in the country that she left.

It was five years ago that I left America to come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring motherland opportunities. As economies convulse in the West and jobs dry up, the idea is spreading virally in émigré homes.

Which raises a heart-stirring question: If our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?

If we are here, what are they doing there?

They came of age in the 1970s, when the “there” seemed paved with possibility and the “here” seemed paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.

My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of Washington’s best schools.

It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.

My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.

Perhaps it was the survivalism born of scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.

My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.

India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: It liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.

America, meanwhile, floundered. In a blink of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, rising economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate change, dwindling oil, a financial crisis.

Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a “Post-American World.” Even in the wake of a historic presidential election, culminating in a dramatic change in direction, it remained unclear whether the United States could be delivered from its woes any time soon.

“In the U.S., there’s a crisis of confidence,” said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant. “In India,” he added, “for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children’s futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough.”

My love for the country of my birth has never flickered. But these new times piqued interest in my ancestral land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.

Exact data on émigrés working in India or spending more time here are scarce. But this is one indicator: India unveiled an Overseas Citizen of India card in 2006, offering foreign citizens of Indian origin visa-free entry for life and making it easier to work in the country. By this July, more than 280,000 émigrés had signed up, according to The Economic Times, a business daily, including 120,000 from the United States.

At first we felt confused by India’s formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. We wondered what newspapers meant when they said, “INSAT-4CR in orbit, DTH to get a boost.” (Apparently, it meant a satellite would soon beam direct-to-home television signals.)

Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to “S&M conferences,” only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing. Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for another man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting.

We learned new expressions: “He is on tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.); “What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes” (Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.).

We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our parents had, but in reverse. Some studied Hindi, others yoga. Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long meditations.

Many of us who shunned Indian clothes in youth began wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars. There was a sad truth in this: We had waited for our heritage to become cool to the world before we draped its colors and textures on our own backs.

We learned how to make friends here, and that it requires befriending families. We learned to love here: Men found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men.

We forged dual-use accents. We spoke in foreign accents by default. But when it came to arguing with accountants or ordering takeout kebabs, we went sing-song Indian.

We gravitated to work specially suited to us. If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase, there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

India’s second-generation returnees have built boutiques that fuse Indian fabrics with Western cuts, founded companies that train a generation to work in Western companies, become dealmakers in investment firms that speak equally to Wall Street and Dalal Street, mixed albums that combine throbbing tabla with Western melodies.

Our parents’ generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.

Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt.

India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.

Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts.